Moderates United

I enjoyed this movie.  I thought it ironic that Robert Redford would play himself, but I suspect he associates all the villainy he represented in the movie with Republicans, in the real world.  Like all leftists of a certain sort, he chooses to remain blind–consciously, of course, as some unconscious part of him is perfectly aware of the evil in him–to the consequences of the constrictions and restrictions and conscious political limiting of non-conforming “Others”, all of whom are very much being set up for some form or other of elimination.  The forcing out of the Firefox CEO is just a soft version of much harder possibilities.  All are constituted by mob rule, the eradication of moral principle, and hate.

As I say often, conformity is the ONLY value POSSIBLE for true leftists.  This is mathematically necessary.  And the myth/symbol of the Hydra multitudes shows this clearly.

As far as the film itself, there were a number of cases where escape was impossible, but achieved in the movie. Nick Fury cut a hole in 18″ of asphalt in 30 seconds.  Easier to believe that, than that the Winter Soldier did not follow him down into the sewers.  Or the underground compound after the missile hit, swarming with smart airships and skilled ground troops.  We are not shown how two wounded people got out of that.

Or to take a more prosaic, but much more insidious example, both Captain America and the Black Widow go into a public shopping mall.  He wears a hat.  Here is the thing: biometric technologies are already well developed not just to do facial recognition, but also gait analysis.  How you walk is very hard to cover up.

And somebody likely would have commandeered the mall cameras.  If they can’t do that today, they–the NSA, DHS, and other agencies–are working on it.

So often one sees in movies–or, hell, the Batman video game I have been playing–the lack of cameras.  All of us need to grasp that cameras are ubiquitous.  If we are in public, we are being filmed often, generally without our knowledge.

The Security State being erected will have no flaws.  You will not be able to do anything anonymously.  There will be no slipping past the secret police.  They will know exactly where you are.  They will hold all the cards.

Our future lies in honest people in the intelligence and military communities, and in those few politicians who are willing to stand up to our collective enslavement in the name of freedom.  And in We the People, those of us willing to call a spade a spade and admit that what is being built is a fascist tyranny, and that it is being supported, tacitly or actively, intentionally or unintentionally, by both Democrats and Republicans.

For my part, I decided years ago I would much rather be on somebody’s list for elimination that keep my mouth shut and entertain a merely illusory safety.

As they show, as well, in that movie, psychosocial algorithyms can and no doubt have been created to identify “dissidents” and those likely to resist the eradication of freedom in American “for our own good”.  If you have strong beliefs, you are likely already on a number of lists, so why not express them?  You may change minds, and enough awake people may be what it takes to protect our grand, our noble, experiment.

It might be worth reposting my two treatments of Obamacare.  Everything that is happening was inevitable.  Yes, of course some low income people are getting a great deal because they are being given healthcare they don’t have to pay for (the rest of us, and our children, do), but the net, aggregate, across the board outcome will be increased premiums AND taxes for nearly everyone, decreased access to medical care as fed up doctors and bankrupt hospitals leave the marketplace, and an overall decrease in access to “quality” medical care.  More costs, less service: in any rational polity, these would readily be seen as obscene, as the OPPOSITE of what Left wing nut cases were supposedly trying to achieve.

It should be added, that those increased profits are going to insurance companies.  They are constrained by the law in how much profit they can earn, but the law ALSO requires people to buy Cadillacs when they want more reasonable options, which means overall revenues will go up.  This is not because of price gouging, but because of the utter and complete indifference of Democrats to business and economic realities.

People forge or fail to realize, though, that the political radicals running the Democrat party are not trying to achieve ANYTHING but the eradication of morality through the eradication of moral difference, which is achieved by making relatively greater individual progress impossible.  No amount of bodies, no amount of suffering, no degradation of the human spirit is too much to achieve this aim.  If this sounds insane, it is, but that is the reality as I see it.

How else to explain the COMPLETE indifference on the part of all the Democrats I see to the disaster that is unfolding in front of us?  All they care about are poll numbers.  This may seem to be a subtle thing, but if you dig deep, the root problem lies in a metaphysical world view, one which many of them, admittedly, do not even realize they have.  They repeat slogans, and pursue policies out of habit, but all them push humanity down.

Short treatment: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/Notes–31–healthcare%20in%20ten%20paragraphs.pdf

Longer treatise: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/obamacare.pdf

I will add, as I feel I need to from time to time, none of this is ccpyrighted.  I am not trying to make money or sell anything.  I am trying to help support intelligent, outcome-based dialogue on topics of intrinsic importance.  Feel free to borrow any or all of these ideas, if you are in fact trying to improve the world, and are capable of accepting a responsibility for outcomes.

Ponder the difference between a bacterial infection and cancer.

As I understand the issue, most of the symptoms of a disease actually come from efforts of the body to fight it off.  Fever, inflammation, mucous formation: all of these are intended to help fight off things that don’t belong there.  If you had none of these defensive elements, you would simply, in some cases, keel over and die when the disease reached a critical mass.  That is my guess, although disease pathology is not something I know much about.

Cancer can spread quite far without any symptoms at all.  I think of Randy Pausch, whose Last Lecture was so well known, who was the image of health even when he was destined to die.

Draw an analogy with emotional energies.  Can it not be that those who most manifest symptoms are in fact those who are trying to fight something off?  And those who manifest nothing are most sick, when not healthy?

Here is a principle I think works: successful efforts at healing are generally characterized by a worsening of a condition prior to improvement.  And if you can’t worse an “element”, it may be it is recalcitrant to healing.

These are high level, perhaps wrong ideas.  I am just playing with metaphors.  You can kick this pile of blocks over if you want.

The quest for final answers on “moral” questions is in my view stupid.  It keeps intellectuals busy, but it is impractical, and tends in aggregate to make things worse.

No moral decision can be divorced from context.  This makes all proper moral decisions, as I have said a number of times, local, necessary, and imperfect.

If someone says “what should I do in this case?”, one of the first things we need to know is who they are, and what their blinds spots are, so we can see the deficiencies in their description of the realities of the situation they are discussing.

What we want are decisions that work in aggregate and over time–systemically–to increase sustainable qualitative felicity.  Often, this involves periods of varying lengths of increased suffering.  This is the nature of how things work, or so I would argue.

I watched this movie, a silent film by D.W. Griffith, a few months back.  It has four stories in it, of which arguably the most elaborate screenplay-wise is the story of a rich old biddy trying to “reform” the working people of her time, by talking her rich brother–who George Shaw would have readily recognized as his sort of fascist–into prohibiting drinking and dancing, and most of the other ways they dealt with the monotony and anomie of their lives.  They refuse to comply, so he cuts wages.  Strikes ensue, people get killed, jobs get lost, and people who had decent lives get thrown more or less literally out on the street.

And the interference from these emotionally confused, intrusive, awful ladies continues.  In one case they take a baby from a woman who was a good mother, and deliver it to a sterile and loveless hospital.

Within this story line, an enormous quantity of awful human events, of suffering, difficulty, want, ensue because people are allegedly trying to HELP, and they, indeed, adopt in the end a self congratulatory tone, not having the foggiest idea–or CARING, to the point–what actually happened.

So much of leftist activity is like this.  They are no longer targeting drinking and dancing, but they are INTERFERING in the lives of people who have not asked them to, who if they were better informed or better led, would throw them out on the asses.  I have in mind particularly the black community.  It may be that the solutions to black poverty and black crime lie in allowing people with almost no job qualifications to be ALLOWED to do work at wages people would actually be willing to pay, so that they can get the skills to be worth more, and in turn be paid more.

Current government policy puts de facto walls around most ghettos, and call this enlightened.  It is not.  It is sluggish, self absorbed, amoral thinking liberally slathered with the most naked and gluttonous self interest.

Here is a cut and paste of a post I did a couple years ago:

When it comes to minimum wage laws, there are three possible outcomes: that the State mandated wage is less than those already paid; that it is equal to them; or that it is more than market conditions would normally allow.

In the first two cases, it is unnecessary.  The third condition, then, is the one which matters.

Labor, like any other commodity, is subject to supply and demand.  When there is a superabundance of work and not enough workers, wages rise.  When unemployment is high, and work is scarce, wages fall.  In all cases, business owners need workers to make money.  It is never in the interest of anyone who wants to grow a business not to grow a business by not hiring people.  Hiring always means more money for the business owner, IF there is money left over after he has paid his expenses, of which the largest is usually labor.

Let us say that a business owner collects $1,000 a week in revenues, and pays out $600 in costs.  If he can hire someone for $200 a week, he can still clear a profit, and free himself up for marketing.  If, however, he is forced by law to pay $400 a week, he will not hire anyone. He can’t afford it.

Let us say that someone desperately needs work, and would be willing to work for $200, but is forced by law to charge $400.  Both people lose.

Leftists do not ask themselves what the people who are competing for low wage jobs want.  They ASSUME they would rather either be paid more than they are perceived as being worth, or be unemployed.  This is almost certainly an error, though.

We have some 50% unemployment in black neighborhoods and poor rural areas, which is close to the high school drop out rate in both areas, and there is probably a lot of overlap between the two.

Kids who have not even graduated high school offer very little in terms of job and life skills.  If they are going to get hired by anyone to do anything, they will in most cases need to discount their labor.  Such a first job would amount to an apprenticeship.  By law, they can’t do this, and so in many cases they go years without getting that first job, never learn work skills, and never become optimally productive as citizens.  

Minimum wage is not intended for people who have careers, who put their time in over a period of years.  Even Burger King and the like pay more than minimum wage for virtually anyone who has worked there more than six months.

These laws do not raise up anyone.  On the contrary, they represent a barrier for entry to the job market for people who in many cases really, really need a job.

Useful framing exercise: I am grateful for this problem.

For confusion: I am grateful for this opportunity to make a decision and learn from it.

If you meet demons where they live, they will never have enough space to cause you trouble.  They need momentum.

The price of peace of mind is diligence–daily focused work–and the development of skill.

Becoming is not repetition.

It occurs to me that one of the outcomes of trauma is inconsolability. You are far beyond the point where a hug, or “talking” will help.  This very fact isolates you, and paradoxically the presence of others, even others who genuinely want to help you, can be antagonizing.

I want to say that the goal of abreaction is not “healing” per se, but facilitating the beginning of the possibility of healing, which is consolability, or the ability to receive comfort, either from yourself, or others.  I would supposed, actually, it would start with being able to comfort yourself, which in turn begins with a sense that you are worthy of comfort, that pursuing the goal of greater well being is acceptable.